Platform Computing developed an implementation of the OCCI protocol/API for the German Research Project DGSI. As part of the Service Sharing Facility (SSF) the occi module is an OCCI implementation written in Python.

Usage is as simple as just saying ‘import occi’ in your code. Since python is an interpreted language and can be easily bind to other programming languages like C/C++ or Java this implementation can be used for several purposes. The module can be installed by either downloading the source and run‘python setup.py install’ or by running ‘easy_install pyssf’.

The implementation includes demos for Job Submission (SaaS/PaaS), a KeyValue store (PaaS) and of cause a skeleton implementation of the OCCI infrastructure model which only needs to be bound to your hyper-visor to create your IaaS based Cloud.

As you might be aware, OpenStack is one of the most exciting and vibrant open source Cloud activities on going currently. The OCCI working group has been engaged with OpenStack over the past 3 months with the aim of contributing an implementation of OCCI and we’re happy to say that this will happen with the “Bexar” release of OpenStack. Incidentally, that’s synchronised with the release schedule of Ubuntu 11.04. the You can see the OCCI blueprint on the OpenStack site, which will serve a point of communication for the implementation work.

Not only will OpenStack receive an implementation of OCCI but one of the mainstays of infrastructure management frameworks, libvirt, will also have an implementation of OCCI. This work is being carried out by a team lead by one OCCI community member, Alexander Papaspyrou from TU Dortmund University, Germany.

Given that OCCI is also implemented in OpenNebula and Apache Tashi (via the SLA@SOI implementation) amongst others (we’re running out of space for this post!), OCCI is fast becoming the API that can provide interoperability between the major Open Source infrastructure management frameworks.

As ever, the OCCI group is always hugely enthusiastic, welcoming and very supportive to people and groups of all types wishing to get involved with OCCI, whether that is through specification contributions or new implementations of it. Curious? Then head on over to IRC (irc.freenode.net #occi), drop a mail on the mailing list or ping some of us on twitter (@dizz, @befreax, @monadic, @papaspyrou).